Secondary menu

Bird flu alert in Odisha

Bhubaneswar: The Odisha government has alerted all its district authorities after a swab sample collected from a migratory bird tested positive for bird flu, an official said here Saturday.

The samples of some migratory birds in Chilika Lake were sent to the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory in Bhopal Jan 20 after they were found having flu-like symptoms, said Satyabrata Sahu, state secretary of the fishery and animal resources department.

The veterinary staffs of all the districts have been ordered to monitor health of all the birds after swab from one bird tested positive. The test report reached Friday, Sahu said.

The 1,000 sq km Chilika Lake, about 100 km from here, is spread over the districts of Puri, Khordha and Ganjam along the eastern coast and is home to some of the largest congregations of migratory birds in the country.

Every year, about a million birds from places as far as Siberia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan come to the lake in October and return in March.

This year over eight lakh migratory birds had visited the lake.

"There is no need to panic as 90 percent of the migratory birds have already returned back from the lake," Sahu told IANS.

advertisements

TCNPositive

Support TCN

Recent Comments

Comments that are found to be in violation of any one or more of the guidelines will be automatically deleted:

Comments containing abusive and offensive language.
Personal attacks directed at the author and other commenters.
Comments targeting a specific community, caste, nationality or religion.
Regular offenders will be blacklisted and prevented from posting on this site.

Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free. You just have to credit TwoCircles.net and link it back to us but you can’t edit our material or sell it separately. (We're licensed under Creative Commons, which provides the legal details.). For publishing TwoCircles.net photos please contact info@twocircles.net.